This pressure continued into last month and there was an occasion where the hospital was forced to declare that A&E was unable to deliver comprehensive care, with increased potential for patient care and safety to be compromised.

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Also, in the same week at the end of January, the hospital had to declare to further warnings as it struggled to cope with demand.

Accident and Emergency at the George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton.

At a George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust Board meeting, Kath Kelly, the hospital’s chief executive, explained: “A year to date there has been an eight per cent increase in our A&E activity.

“We have responded with extra capacity that we have also put up in our ward areas, there are lots of pressures in the system, the challenge for us is managing the front end and the patients that are in hospital and the discharge and the relationship with local authorities, again , there are some challenges in getting people home in a timely fashion and safely.

“A lot organisations are under the same pressure as us and I think, for us, from my perspective, what’s different this year is that it has been a sustained level of pressure and the overcrowding in the A&E department.

“It is such a challenge for staff that come in everyday, you can’t even start your work properly because you are dealing with things from the night before and that is some of the biggest challenges we face.”

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John Thompson, director of operations added they intended to do a “deep dive” into the failure to meeting ambulance release times, waiting targets and trolley waits.

“It is an indication of the pressures that the team down there in A&E were under in terms of managing patients,” he said,

“In terms of Delayed Transfer of Care (DETOC), we are going to be doing a bit more of a deep dive into that to try and understand what happened. December can be a bit of a funny month when we have the festive period, and we do have a bit of a clear out before Christmas but usually that sets up very quickly after Christmas and sometimes those patients return and we have seen that pressure build up again very quickly.”